


Working Relationship

by Xie



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 18:00:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12064164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xie/pseuds/Xie
Summary: Brian and Justin working it out.





	Working Relationship

Justin was standing in front of his worktable, biting into his lower lip and scuffing his toe on the floor. He was gazing in an unfocused way at his painting, spread out flat in front of him. From where I was sitting, it looked like a tortuous jumble of shapes, blocky and inert. I knew he was about to streak life all over it, bring it all together with one color, one line, one layer of texture.

He put down his brush, shoved his hair out of his eyes, and grinned in my direction. “Stop staring at me.”

I snorted. “Genius at work. I can’t tear my eyes away.”

“I noticed.”

I just shrugged and went back to my laptop. I was scrolling through the website of Kinnetik’s latest account, trying to find the little thing in their public image that was making their market skew too old for their target demographic. They had everything they should have had: Interactivity, minimalist design, and just the right tone in what little text there was. I clicked on another link.

“What’s the problem?”

Justin had come up behind me and was looking over my shoulder at the screen. He dropped into the seat next to me, and I turned it so he could see it. I tried not to flinch when his paint-smeared fingers touched the keys. I was always cleaning paint off of everything. I should have invested in Goof-off.

I didn’t watch the pages Justin was clicking through. I just watched his face. The light from the monitor flashed and darkened, and twice I saw his forehead tighten up. I amused myself imagining what he’d look like when those ridges and lines became permanent, probably when he was around 110. If everyone aged like Justin, the botox industry would collapse overnight.

Justin shook his head. “This design sucks.”

I shrugged. “What design?” Never let an artist near a website. And that wasn’t what was wrong.

Justin went back to his painting, and I watched him drizzling yellow paint all over the canvas. It was the last thing I’d expected him to do. I’d been sure he was going to add red.

___________________________________

I was almost asleep when he came upstairs. I’d thought maybe the problem with my client’s message would come to me in a dream, but I woke up enough to see if maybe the problem would come to me in a blowjob.

He smiled at me in the dim light. “I should shower. I’m covered in paint.”

“You’re always covered in paint.” I flipped back the cover, and he laughed while he stripped off his jeans and crawled across the bed.

I covered us both up with the duvet. I wasn’t cold, but Justin was; I always had to turn the thermostat down when I got home and he’d been in the studio all day. Our heating bills dropped in half when he was out of town during the winter.

His feet slipped and slid on my legs, and his face was burrowing into my neck. I wrapped my arms around him and rolled over on top of him, kissing his face and tightening my fingers in his hair. When he got his legs around my waist, I forgot all about the blowjob, and reached out my hand for the lube on the bedside table.

He’d already gotten it, and he squirted some on my fingers, then bucked impatiently against them while I gently swirled them at his opening. I laughed and kissed him, teasing his hole open with just the tip of one finger, sneaking it in and then bending it inside him.

He groaned, and I eased a second finger in next to the first, letting them move against each other and the walls of his ass. I got kind of lost in that feeling for a while, his ass tightening and releasing around my knuckles, and the way every breath he let out turned into a soft moan at the end.

I finally pressed my cock inside him, feeling his ass gripping me while his heels drove into my back like he couldn’t get me deep enough. My elbows were digging into the bed on either side of him, and my hands were holding his face, my fingers tangled in his hair. I kissed him, and licked the sweat off his face, his throat. He lifted up his hips, and I sank deeper into him. I wasn’t expecting it, and it raced like white electricity up my spine.

I was thrusting into him over and over, his hands and legs and feet pulling on me, drawing me in. I felt that same sense of being lost in him, buried in him, everything white and hot and blinding behind my eyes. I started to come and felt something rip out of my throat, rough and quiet. He was frozen, too, and I felt the familiar gush of his come on my stomach, felt his ass muscles clenching on my cock.

He lay under me for a long time, and I fought falling asleep because I knew both of us needed a shower. The sheets probably needed changing, too, although it wouldn’t be the first time we’d slept in a crusted mess of lube and come and paint. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the last. I must have fallen asleep for a minute, but when I heard him turning on the water in the shower, I got up and followed him in.

I was stripping sheets off the bed when Justin came back out, rubbing his hair with a towel. I tossed him one side of a clean sheet across the mattress, and we pulled the corners tight. He threw himself down on the bed, and laughed and bounced a little. I tossed the pillows at him before grabbing the duvet off the floor and getting back in bed next to him.

I woke up while it was still dark. Justin was apparently trying not to wake me by wriggling quietly out from under the duvet instead of just getting up. It didn’t work.

I said something that was supposed to be an inquiry as to his destination, but came out more like “Mgghhhdbmmb.”

“I thought of something about my painting.” He was shoving his legs into his sweatpants.

I closed my eyes. There wasn’t any point in telling him to go back to bed when he thought of something about a painting.

When my alarm went off, I was alone in the bed. I stumbled downstairs and turned on the coffeemaker, then carried two mugs into Justin’s studio.

He was kneeling on his worktable next to his canvas, his weight resting on one hand while he dabbed at the painting with a rag, his brush clenched in his teeth. In a move that made my back hurt, he shifted the rag to the other hand, stretched across the edge of the painting, and dipped his brush into an open can of paint. He laid a huge stroke of stark white along the edge of the canvas, then went back to dabbing with his rag.

I cleared my throat. “Coffee?”

He looked at me, and even after all these years, the smile that lit up his face made me want to say and do stupid things I’d undoubtedly regret all day. I settled for handing him his coffee.

Justin sat back on his heels and took the cup. “This is why I love you.”

I nodded. “That and the great sex.”

He nodded. “Well, there is that.”

Justin set his mug down and went back to the painting. “I was thinking about that website you showed me.” He swiped more white across the surface. “I think you know what’s wrong with that company’s image.”

I sipped my coffee and sat on the sofa. “What is it?”

“I have no idea. But I think you do.”

I drank coffee and watched him paint and dab for a while. I watched the way his hair fell into his eyes, and I thought about all the times I’d run my hands through it, and had them come away streaked with blue, or had to rub orange marks off his nose.

I was halfway upstairs to change before I realized I hadn’t answered him.

_______________________________

When I got to Kinnetik, Cynthia was standing by my desk, talking in a quiet voice with the staff assigned to the new account. They all looked at me with various mixtures of hope and desperation. I smiled in a way meant to be non-committal with just a hint of reassurance, but Cynthia saw right through me and her face fell. I shook my head.

The four of them moved over to the conference table, and I sat at my desk and brought the client’s website up on my laptop again. I stared at it, thinking about what Justin had said, that I already knew what the problem was.

When the client and his team got there, we all schmoozed and shook hands while interns scurried in with coffee and water. Then we got down to business. I smiled across the table at everyone, and opened my mouth.

“Philip, I think I know what the problem is.” Cynthia relaxed almost imperceptibly, and I continued. “What age demographic are you targeting?”

He frowned. “We’ve been over this. 18-29.”

I nodded. “And what demographic are you actually hitting?”

He shrugged. “Something like 25-39.”

I smiled, and sat back. “Congratulations.”

He just stared at me.

“Philip, the problem isn’t your message, your image, or your website. It’s not your product, either. It’s your demographic data, or more specifically, it’s your marketing plan.” I hadn’t been sure of what was going to come out of my mouth when I opened it, and for the first time I stopped to think about what I was saying. I decided, what the hell. “And your marketing department. You should fire them all.”

Philip glanced at the woman on his left, and from the tiny smile that flashed briefly over the corners of her mouth, I figured I had at least one ally. “Why the hell do you want a bunch of teenagers and college students? Just because some marketing survey lumped them into the same age breakdown as your actual target market? Your message isn’t skewing old, your product skews old.”

I smiled brightly. “Which is a good thing, since those guys in their late 30s? They have a lot more money than those teenagers you’re missing. And the fact that you’ve been aiming your message slightly younger has been working for you, because everyone knows guys never want to grow up.”

I leaned forward, and he unconsciously did too. I felt the little rush that told me I was closing in for the kill. “Now it’s time to combine that search for eternal youth with their increased spending power. Fire your marketing people. Focus your message on your product’s actual market. Oh, and one more thing…” I let myself look just a little smug. “Hire more people in production, because you’re going to be very, very busy soon.”

Cynthia was beaming, the woman sitting next to Philip was beaming, and pretty soon we were all standing around, shaking hands and signing contracts, which meant Ted was beaming, too.

I was sitting at my desk later that afternoon when Justin walked in. I almost didn’t recognize him due to the lack of paint.

I raised an eyebrow at him after he leaned down to kiss me, and he smiled. “I had lunch with Daphne, and was just wondering how your client meeting went.” He perched his ass on the edge of my desk, crossed his arms across his chest, and waited.

I smiled at him lazily. “I was brilliant, of course.”

He laughed. “Of course. I never doubted it. Did you ever figure out what the problem was, or did you just dazzle them with massive amounts of bullshit and make them forget there was a problem in the first place?”

I got up and stood between his legs with my arms draped over his shoulders. “Does it matter? They loved it.” I touched his forehead with mine. “How did the painting go?”

He shrugged. “It feels… unfinished.”

I folded my lips in. “Unfinished, as in, you have to finish it, or unfinished as in, you finished it and it sucks?”

He shrugged, and I could tell he wanted to move away, but I increased the weight of my arms on his shoulders. He looked right at me, and I saw that wrinkle in his forehead again, just for a second. “It’s not finished, and it’s missing something. I don’t know what.”

“Life.” I didn’t think before I said it.

“You mean it’s boring?” He looked confused.

I shook my head. “It’s waiting for some life.”

He looked at me, and blinked once. I gave him an almost-smile, and he blinked again. “I need to go home.”

I let him go this time. “Later.”

He turned and flashed me a smile on his way out the door. “Later.”

I sat back down at my desk. I was pretty sure Ted and Cynthia had a completely mistaken idea about just why Justin’s visit had me smiling the rest of the day, but I didn’t explain.


End file.
